The original Boombot was conceived as an alternative to headphones. The founder of Boombotix, Lief Storer, was commuting via bicycle to and from work across a mile of traffic and three miles of bayside estuary. He wanted something that would be safer than headphones while also immersing himself in the outdoors with his music. He worked as an engineer by day and an artist by night. When the company flew him to Taiwan to work on LED lighting systems, he discovered Japanese urban vinyl toy design. He began incorporating the toy medium into his work before coming across a Do-it-Yourself toy called the Skully.

The Skully featured asymmetrical eyes in a tennis ball-sized form factor. The toy was made of PVC on a rotocast. Using the shell and some off-the-shelf portable speaker components and a Motorola walkie-talkie belt clip, Lief assembled the first working prototypes. Many of his friends took interest in the product, and a company was beginning to form. Over the next year, Lief spent his off-hours meticulously refining the design to move closer to a satisfactory working prototype. The first production prototypes were tested in rain drenched San Francisco and the deep treacherous powder throughout Lake Tahoe.

By April of 2010, Lief had raised enough private equity and built enough into the design to bring the first Boombots to the market. They were super simple, featuring an on/off button, rechargeable battery, retractable audio cable, and a hip clip.

our international ecommerce platform

Boombotix direct eCommerce has provided a significant amount of revenue for our domestic business. Direct eCommerce is a fantastic way for a brand like Boombotix to control the entire customer experience from product education to full brand immersion. What about our international distributors?

the problem with many brands’ ecommerce sites

Our company has distributors in a number of countries worldwide, but our distributors have only benefited from wholesale with lower margins and greater cash flow requirements. We wanted our distributors to invest in building an expensive site for their territory while also maintaining a really tight grip on our branding. When we looked at our analytics, we saw that our international distributors were not driving significant amounts of traffic to our site. This was understandable, as the distributor does not benefit directly from driving sales on our eCommerce site. At the same time, our team was struggling with fulfilling international orders. If anything went wrong on the transit, our margin was pretty much demolished.

our international ecommerce solution

We popped open the hood on Shopify, our eCommerce platform, to find that the API provided a lot of the necessary data we needed to forward others by territory. Using that data, we are able to create a series of filters by country. We set up login areas for each of our distributors where they could register for new order notifications in their respective countries, and integrate with their current logistics system. Now, when a customer orders product in Australia, the order is automatically forwarded to the Australian distributor The distributor would ship the customer his order, and we provide additional cash or credit to the distributor for driving the direct sale. Going direct to the consumer and having a smooth logistics process in place effectively increase everyone’s margins.

what this international ecommerce will do for business

When you build a site like this it does wonders for your relationship with your distributors. Suddenly, your distributors are incentivized to carry the full assortment of your SKUs. They are driven to push traffic and generate backlinks to your website and they are compensated for the increased sales. They no longer have to invest in building and maintaining a website. Newer browser translation technologies have allowed for just about any site to at least be coherent enough to drive a sale, instead of internationalizing. Customers in various territories can take comfort in knowing that their product doesn’t have to touch twenty-five hands between going door to door. Anyone that is running a wholesale business internationally with direct eCommerce can really benefit from this application.

A method to crowd source content generation

As an ultraportable speaker company, we promote our users to take our product out in the field and engage in the world around them. One dilemma has always been being able to effectively capture the experience our customers are having. We followed GoPro closely over the years and saw how their users were using the video content in order to promote their product. GoPro was essential crowd sourcing customers content and educating future buyers how to use the crazy helmet camera. As a result, GoPro benefited from cost effective content creation and positive brand association with top athletes.

How we adopted the GoPro content creation strategy

Our product was initially created for the urban rider and we envisioned cyclists taking videos with their Boombot. As it turned out, photos became a much more popular medium than video content for our users. The growing popularity of Instagram and the simplicity of generating photo content attracted a larger user base.

The idea was simple. We called it Swagonomics because it rewarded users with gear for great content. Users would sign up for an account using their already existing Instagram account. Anytime a user hashtagged #boombotix in their post, it would get pulled onto our feed. We wanted users to capture their active lifestyle while stimulating brand interaction between our users. Over time, users connected with other Swagonomics users due to interest in each other’s photographs.

Our site flooded with hundreds of photos in just a matter of weeks. Naturally, this introduced more problems, but importantly we were acquiring user generated content.

And voila! It was crowd sourcing at its infancy.

In SEO, content quality is always king

What happens when people start hashtagging #boombotix on random photos just go get points? How do you determine what adds value to the site versus detracts from it? The questions bounced around internally, so you could imagine that the community was wondering the same things. The need for a site moderator became very clear early on. Suddenly we had to make decisions on what we wanted our brand to represent. Looking back on it, this was a positive problem. We were essentially defining our brand values and creating the rules around what we defined as swag.

We created a back end that allowed us to disable posts from the feed in bulk. We tried fostering an understanding in our users of the quality we wanted to see. By moderating the feed quality, users are able to gain a better understanding of what to put on the site. It was tricky and feelings were hurt, but we had to make moves for the better interest of the brand.

We didn’t drop our bloggers that we worked with. The content from our Swagonomics site did not replace the keyword rich content we developed on our blog. Swagonomics was just supplementing the site with a massive database with SEO rich images in a very cost effective manner. On numerous occasions, employees in the companies grabbed content from Swagonomics to use in marketing. That’s convenient.

where our company is going with swagonomics and gamification

The Swagonomics experiment is far from done, but this site has created the foundation for a gamified brand experience. The introduction of points and rewards built around promoting the brand in real life can be applied to a number of activities. As our community grows, the potential for our users to spread the word does too. When traditional marketing mediums like print are on their way out, brands that leverage digital media with social content marketing will be the ones that come out on top. They will drive the most direct eCommerce sales and build the greatest brand equity of all.

This month’s BoSS, or better known as Battle of the Supreme Swag, got heated. These top 16 competitors got super stylie and showed off their gloving skills. Congratulations to Cire, Ice Kream Teddy, Mumbles and Bonkers for being the top glovers!